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Mobility News Briefing - Oct 23

It's hard to keep up with every news story, interesting article, and blog post.
Catch us every Friday for a roundup of the stories we think you want to know about each week. Subscribe to make sure you don't miss an update!

The story? Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune reported that as a result of their partnership with Apple that was announced in 2014, IBM began to offer Macs to their 400,000 employees on June 1st. Last week, the man responsible for deploying the new machines, Fletcher Previn, gave his first status report with some surprising and impressive numbers.

So what? Prior to the Apple and IBM partnership, IBM believed "Macs were more expensive, more challenging to support, and would require retraining the help desk." Previn's numbers proved the opposite to be true.

The numbers? So far, 130,000 Macs and iOS devices are in use at IBM, of which 5% of users needed help desk support versus 40% of Windows PC users, and of the Mac queries, a whopping 98.7% were resolved on the first call.

The story? Employees can, want, and will work, on-the-go, on their personal devices, regardless of their location. The days of employees carrying two devices around, one company owned and one personal, are nearing an end, and it's not a bad thing. 90% of companies who allow BYOD see productivity rates improve and 83% see increased employee satisfaction.

The problem? When employees use a company-owned device to get their work done, enterprises have control over what can be done, where it can be done, in order to keep corporate data secure. With BYOD, enterprises loose that control, and this is posing new threats.

What to do? Gwen Moran of Fast Company shared 8 helpful recommendations for employees to protect their company and themselves from threats like lost and stolen devices and data breaches. My favorite one, "be mindful of backup," because while automatic backups for my personal photos have came in handy many times, company data can be put at risk when backed up to the Apple or Google cloud.

The story? Colin Steele of Tech Target investigates what is being considered as the next big trend, wearable devices, and whether Wear Your Own Device (WYOD) is going to take off in the business world like BYOD did. He explained that "WYOD refers to the expected onslaught of employee-own smartwatches and, to a lesser extent, smart glasses in the workplace."

The wearables to know about? While the sleek design of th Apple Watch got a lot of attention, it was not the first wearable to the party. Back in 2012 the Pebble Smartwatch was in the spotlight on Kickstarter and raised $10 million+ in just one month. Google Glass also proved buzz-worthy, as the first device to display information directly in the user's line of vision.

His hypothesis? The wearables market has some growing up and maturing to do before it's going to disrupt the enterprise in the way BYOD did. As of now, Steele doesn't see wearables offering much more than a convenient way to see and respond to email and text notifications, but in the next 4 years, the market is expected to grow 35% per year.